1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for maintaining Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) information for virtual machines.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One area in which computer software has evolved to take advantage of high performance hardware is in virtualization of physical computers into virtual machines. A virtual machine is a set of data structures and services that enables distribution of computer resources within a host computer to make the host computer function as if it were two or more independent computers. The host computer is capable of supporting a number of virtual machines, and each virtual machine runs its own operating system and one or more application programs. The host provides each virtual machine with its own set of computer resources, typically virtualized counterparts of the physical resources of the host.
Virtualization can help reduce the machine count in a data center, but virtualization of physical computers has drawbacks. Individual computers in large computing environments like data centers, for example, are typically tracked with RFID transponders that are written and queried with RFID readers in RFID networks. Several operating environments from less powerful physical computers can be completely installed in separate virtual machines on a powerful host computer, and the less powerful computers can be removed. Such virtualization, however, loses the one-to-one relationship between the RFID transponders and the operating environments that were previously installed on separate physical computers, each having its own RFID transponder.